SafetyCo Partners expands into Northern Ontario

SafetyCo Partners, a Toronto-based provider of integrated safety solutions, expands into Northern Ontario with the launch of SafetyCo North. The new division, headquartered in Sault Ste. Marie, follows the acquisition of Norpro’s Health & Safety Division and aims to address what company leaders describe as a fragmented safety services landscape in the region.

Mark Ferrier, co-founder and president of SafetyCo Partners, says the move responds to a growing need for scalable safety solutions as industry and regulation evolve. “There’s going to be a massive supply and demand problem as the industry evolves to more regulation, the industry evolves to more new workers and workers having to learn new skills in the marketplace,” Ferrier says. “The service provider model has been a very fractured one with a bunch of amazing individuals who’ve been in businesses over decades. But those businesses aren’t going to do it for the next two decades.”

SafetyCo North offers organizations in Sault Ste. Marie, North Bay, Sudbury, Timmins, and surrounding areas access to on-site safety officers, workforce and regulatory training, inspection and compliance consulting, rescue services, and industrial hygiene support. The company also provides ISO 9001 and 45001 implementation and auditing, as well as expanded services such as air quality evaluations and noise assessments.

Shannan Boston, a health and safety specialist with more than 20 years of experience, co-leads the new division. She says the acquisition allows SafetyCo North to address longstanding gaps in the region’s safety infrastructure. “Up to now, the services have been very fragmented over the years. So not necessarily as readily available as it may be to another employer in other areas of the province,” Boston says. “We can now provide that same level of quality and access to professional safety personnel and have a full catalog of already developed supported services and training services that are readily available.”

Boston also points to the opportunity to build regional teams and create local employment. “We’re now able to start to develop and build our own regional teams to provide some employment to great qualified, competent safety professionals in the north who are passionate about the work that they do,” she says.

Ferrier describes the company’s broader strategy as one of integration and consistency. “If you take the CEO of all those great ideas that founders had, all we did was an empower solution for them going forward,” he says. “We’re heavily investing in technology, not technology to complicate things, but technology to complement things in the safety space.”

Since its founding in 2022, SafetyCo has acquired five businesses and now employs more than 100 safety professionals. The company continues to operate acquired firms under their original brands while introducing new solutions under the SafetyCo name. Ferrier says, “we have a bunch of really strong brands that have been in marketplace for decades and customers literally rely on them to operate their business. And so, we’re not changing out those brands anytime soon or maybe ever. What we’re trying to do is enhance and really make those brands even stronger with what SafetyCo is able to bring to them.”